Trusting Like the Blessed Virgin Mary: Weekly Message for 05-14-2024

Dear Friends,

I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide. (John 15:16)
Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. (Hebrews 10:35)

In his magnificent poem “East Coker,” T.S. Eliot puts it bluntly yet beautifully: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” This is, perhaps, the great struggle of faith.

Christ calls us to believe without seeing fully and to act without total knowledge of the end. This is the great story of all God’s friends, both in Sacred Scripture and in the history of the Church.

And it is, above all, the story of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her “Let it be to me according to your word” does not inaugurate a worriless life, leaping from victory to victory in the clear light of day. In fact, St. Luke tells us that immediately after Mary’s great act of trust, “the angel left her.” That one laconic phrase summarizes the drama of all believers.

We do not receive a detailed playbook of the future. We do not know how our lives will end. We do not know the eternal good that God will bring from our obedience to him.

And yet we have Christ’s promise that our struggle to respond with trust will bear fruit in ways, for now, known only to him.

God bless you,

Fr. John Pietropaoli